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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Babagounj" data-source="post: 1799096" data-attributes="member: 12952">“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”The debate of who becomes an American citizen by virtue of being born on U.S. soil turns on the words “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”  The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Citizenship Clause over time supports the original meaning of that clause, a clause which does not extend citizenship to the children of illegal aliens.Professor John Eastman—the former dean of Chapman University’s law school and a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas—thoroughly discusses the original meaning of the Citizenship Clause in <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2006/03/from-feudalism-to-consent-rethinking-birthright-citizenship?ac=1#_ftn9" target="_blank">From Feudalism to Consent</a>. He explores the congressional speeches of two of the clause’s primary authors, Senators Lyman Trumbull and Jacob Howard, and how they made it clear that this part of the amendment only applied to children born to parents who were not citizens of another country.Professor Lino Graglia’s <a href="http://www.trolp.org/main_pgs/issues/v14n1/Graglia.pdf" target="_blank">article</a> in the Texas Review of Law & Politics. In it, the professor explores in greater detail the point , that the 39th Congress—which in 1865 voted for the Thirteenth Amendment and in 1866 voted for the first Civil Rights Act—later in 1866 repackaged the Civil Rights Act’s definition of citizenship in the new Fourteenth Amendment, and that the Civil Rights Act’s original language explicitly excluded citizens of foreign countries.Graglia also notes that instant citizenship is an incredibly strong magnet that temps foreigners to break our laws. “It is difficult to imagine a more irrational and self-defeating legal system than one which makes unauthorized entry into this country a criminal offense and simultaneously provides perhaps the greatest possible inducements to illegal entry.”</blockquote>

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